Two of the Asheville three…
For those of us who don’t cry when we hear the word sushi, emotional relationships take up a good portion of our time. Literary correspondences have garnered our interest lately (who isn’t haunted by this split?), usually when thinking about how Jonathan Safran Foer hate-makes love to his wife Nicole Krauss.
Sometimes it is hard to balance these relationships, as in the case of Chip Kidd and J.D. McClatchy:
Kidd: We just both did a one-month sabbatical in Italy, where we shared a studio and we were writing, and at one point toward the end – I mean, I’m writing this 10,000-word novella – he read it and said, “You know, maybe it shouldn’t be in the first person. Maybe you should write it in the third person.” At which point I wanted to roll it up and introduce it into his gullet. Why don’t I just shred the whole thing and we can use it to heat our home?
McClatchy: It seems to me that your spouse is not always the best critic. My favorite story about that is about Leonard Woolf. Whenever Virginia wrote a new novel, she would take the manuscript to her husband, and he would read it, and every time he said the same thing to her: “Well, you’ve done it again, Virginia.” That seems to me to be exactly what you want to hear from your spouse.
Ha ha.
Anyway, since I’m struggling to write anything, let alone a long blog post about literary couples, check out this e-mail correspondence I dug out from the archives. Our frequent contributor Will Hubbard sent along this poem to me and a few other people.
LE LIT
Such arms
and these two legs—
most everything else
just like me!
We are in bed.
The bed is
an invitation—
it has warmth
we do not. Roof
keeps out the rain
and the walls take it
down to the ground.
Can use the center
of our chest and face
to talk. There is no rain—
it is not raining.
Here the few hours
everyone else is here,
not more.
Morning eggs,
sun to rise, some
several birds, etc.
Another day
possible night—
and here
practically the same
lively thing we’re
just about to sleep.
Clearly a poem more interesting to the opposite sex, or am I projecting?
Anyway, one of Will’s friends is the poet and artist Lisa Flaherty and her response struck me as more interesting than the poem that inspired it.
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Lisa Flaherty
Date: Oct 28, 2006 2:40 AM
Subject: Re: yes/no
To: William Hubbard
Fuck YOu! You’re so beautiful.. and yet, is the beauty of your words any measure of how beautiful you are? That last line… ! Fuck… your line! Like Harris said… Your LINE!
“were just about to sleep” You make me cry, no really, I’m crying right now, like I said…
I am a crying girl, and I’m listening to just the right kind of music (old Liz Phair), and your LINE is epitomally human, it is a flake of your life,,, meaning: You are in some way the poster child for truth. Meaning” : you say IT: what we could never say: “Just like Me!” and yet there is a sadness, and that is why I’m crying: “It has warmth / we do not” … so… there is a lacking.
There is a sense of failure. In your poems, we have failed the potential of love (if that’s cheesy substitute LIFE), and yet there is a sliver of hope: “we can use the center…” Your poetry is binary: We have failed in our attempt at being superb humans and yet… because we continue being so, unabashedly (sp?), there is redemption. The naive human story hurts and yet heals with its innocence. The Catch 22 is a miracle. Your poetry is a miracle: Paradoxical, beautifully
didactic, no not didactic, Just true. Simple, eggs, sleep, bodies, and yet, its like saying “Hey this moment!!! Have you ever seen such a thing?!?” And though the answer for every universal reader is “Yes,” the saying of it is anomalous, no not the saying of it, the honoring of it.
I know that sounds cheesy, but fuck it, it’s a great gift. To say, here, eggs, what a fucking perfect thing. To say, bodies, hey! LOOK! Such similar alienation creating connection. The rain not raining, the rain not raining, the rain not raining. LOOK we can talk, how interesting! Am I making too much of it? I don’t care.. If your poetry gets me off that way don’t take it from me! It’s like you really like it, life. And the incomplete bumping about of many bodies into each other’s love. I like That. And you put it so simply, no Ivy Tower for your heart, no dictionary in your blossoming mouth, only the
morning and the eggs and the body.
And O the complications of embodiment… (!).
I love you.
L
Damn, and people say I’m good at flattery! I’m a rank amateur. Seriously though that is genius. Later on our resident toolbox Will sent along .jpgs of his paintings. Who does such a thing? I love it.
This one is called Other World.
This one is called Pink Angels.
Lisa’s response:
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Lisa Flaherty
Date: Jan 26, 2007 5:57 AM
Subject: Re: glug
To: William Hubbard
Will! These paintings are actually quite good!
The second one (the darker) needs centrality.
maybe a screenprinted poem in white?
Too soundtrack, decorative, you know?
The first, though, very total, compositionally.
Moments of specificity amongst chaotic colour field.
mondrian meets rothko
no that’s not it…
kandinsky and klee maybe
you’re destroying the golden mean
and yet there’s restraint.
The surprising placements of colour have naitvete
like basquiat
and yet, there is a fine-ness, absolutley not urban,
that relays a sort of mathematical discernment.
Am I repeating myself?
I mean I see the heat of the moment in the strokes
(in that sense it’s action painting)
but I also sense a secret.
The painter has a prerogative.
Its not pure expression, it’s storytelling,
here is a random green blob, here is a finely angled line.
The painter is feeling but not psychotic.
There is a smartness in the abstraction of math.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it,
but this one feels like some kind of apex,
all those paintings in asheville were only sketches
this is conglomerate and whole.
Keep going!
Poet/Painters are hot!
You have promise!
If you could take all that scatteredness in colour/line/space
and apply to it the focus you do to your poetry
That Tersity! In one stanza there is the most meaning,
make that the same as in one corner/quadrant of your canvas
don’t spread yourself so evenly!
Make your viewer’s eyes linger on the last line.
The last colour, make some blob of colour the most important.
Make it the crux.
Show the viewer the final point
all your brushstrokes have traveled towards.
This is cheesy, I just mean,
If youre going to cut your body open,
do it, and show us everything,
but end with pointing
to the organ
that hurts you most.
L
Let this serve as an open warning to my many e-mail correspondents–it’s open season on all nightstalkers.
This Recording 
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